Fat Ham

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fat Ham Shanelle E. Kim Fat Ham Presented by The Public Theater and the National Black Theatre at Anspacher Theater, New York. 12 May–31 July 2022. Written by James Ijames. Directed by Saheem Ali. Set design by Maruti Evans. Lighting design and direction by Stacey Derosier. Costume design by Dominique Fawn Hill. Sound design and direction by Mikaal Sulaiman. With Nikki Crawford (Tedra), Chris Herbie Holland (Tio), Billy Eugene Jones (Rev/Pap), Adrianna Mitchell (Opal), Calvin Leon Smith (Larry), Marcel Spears (Juicy), and Benja Kay Thomas (Rabby). “This ain’t Shakespeare,” James Ijames writes in “A Note from the Playwright: Is & Aint’s,” featured in the program for The Public Theater and the National Black Theatre’s 2022 co-production of Fat Ham. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Shakespeare. This just ain’t him.” And though his own play is based on Hamlet, Ijames insists, “This ain’t a tragedy. While I appreciate and weep through tragedies on a daily basis, both imagined and real, this play is not that.” While there is certainly much of Shakespeare and tragedy to be found in Ijames’s play, Fat Ham imagines a world of possibilities beyond the limitations of both. Fat Ham follows Juicy (Marcel Spears), a young Black gay man, as he prepares for a backyard cookout to celebrate the marriage between his mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), and his paternal uncle, Rev (Billy Eugene Jones). Juicy is a reluctant participant in these festivities, however, as he is still grieving the death of his father, Pap (also played by Jones), who was stabbed to death in prison by another inmate. While Juicy set up decorations and chairs with the aid of his friend in this production’s opening scene, Tio (Chris Herbie Holland), Pap’s ghost appeared, insisting that the young man avenge his father’s death on the presumption that his brother, Rev, ordered the hit with the intent of taking over the family business—barbecuing pigs—and marrying his wife. As it was for Hamlet, Pap’s injunction proved to be a heavy burden for Juicy, who spent the rest of the play struggling with his desire to break free from generational patterns of violence. [End Page 545] Processing his private grief became especially difficult when the loudly, lewdly affectionate couple arrived on the scene. Juicy found himself pulled between Rev’s belittlements and Tedra’s attempts to appease, and tensions were heightened when Juicy learned that the two had spent his tuition money on bathroom renovations. The arrival of family friend Rabby (Benja Kay Thomas) and her two children added to the distraction; the devout churchgoing Rabby clashed with her daughter, Opal (Adrianna Mitchell), who was forced to wear a dress by her mother while longing to express her own queerness and individuality. Larry (Calvin Leon Smith), meanwhile, mediated between his mother and his sister while managing his own desires for Juicy. The play expertly added pressure onto all of these characters until they were forced into an emotional release that spilled over onto the picnic table, the patio, into the house, and all over the backyard. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, tragedy so consumes characters that they are driven into isolation. Whole families fall apart, as do marriages. Hamlet himself shuns his loved ones, swallowed up by his own internal struggles. Yet even as Juicy falls into his own thoughts, turning away from the other characters and speaking only to the audience, his friends and family always call him back. Stop quoting Shakespeare, they say; eat something, have a go at the karaoke machine. This production of Fat Ham nudged its characters ever closer together; with the exception of Tio, who left to get more drinks, and Pap, who appeared and then disappeared, everyone stayed in the backyard or went inside the house. Such intimacy and proximity may be uncomfortable, even violent; both families experience infighting, and in a particularly intense scene Larry physically attacked Juicy for outing him to the others. And yet, community—especially communities of eating—is how Fat Ham rewrites the tragedies of generational violence and systems of oppression. Echoing an early moment in which Tedra fixed a plate for...